“Ha! That sounds like something from Mother
Goose. Not a bit of butter for supper,”
laughed Uncle Wiggily. “Not a bit of batter-butter
for the pitter-patter supper. If Peter Piper
picked a pit of peckled pippers—­”

“Oh, don’t start that!” begged Nurse
Jane. “All I need is some supper for butter—­no
some bupper for batter—­oh, dear! I’ll
never get it straight!” she cried.

“I’ll say it for you,” said Uncle
Wiggily, kindly. “I know what you want—­some
butter for supper. I’ll go get it for you.”

“Thank you,” Nurse Jane exclaimed, and
so the old rabbit gentleman started off over the fields
and through the woods for the butter store.

The monkey-doodle gentleman waited on him, and soon
Uncle Wiggily was on his way back to the hollow stump
bungalow with the butter for supper, and he was thinking
how nice the carrot muffins would taste, for Nurse
Jane had promised to make some, and Uncle Wiggily was
sort of smacking his whiskers and twinkling his nose,
when, all at once, he heard some one in the woods
calling:

“Uncle Wiggily! Oh, I say, Uncle Wiggily!
Can’t you stop for a moment and say how-d’-do?”

“Why, of course, I can,” answered the
bunny, and, looking around the corner of an old log,
he saw Grandpa Whackum, the old beaver gentleman,
who lived with Toodle and Noodle Flat-tail, the beaver
boys.

“Come in and sit down for a minute and rest
yourself,” invited Grandpa Whackum.

“I will,” said Uncle Wiggily. “And
I’ll leave my butter outside where it will be
cool,” for Grandpa Whackum lived down in an underground
house, where it was so warm, in summer, that butter
would melt.

Grandpa Whackum was a beaver, and he was called Whackum
because he used to whack his broad, flat tail on the
ground, like beating a drum, to warn the other beavers
of danger. Beavers, you know, are something
like big muskrats, and they like water. Their
tails are flat, like a pancake or egg turner.

“Well, how are things with you, and how is Nurse
Jane?” asked Grandpa Whackum.

“Oh, everything is fine,” said Uncle Wiggily.
“Nurse Jane is well. I’ve just been
to the store to get her some butter.”

“That’s just like you; always doing something
for some one,” said Grandpa Whackum, pleased
like.

Then the two friends talked for some little while
longer, until it was almost 6 o’clock, and time
for Uncle Wiggily to go.

“I’ll take my butter and travel along,”
he said. But when he went outside, where he
had left the pound of butter on a flat stump, it wasn’t
there.

“Why, this is queer,” said the bunny uncle.
“I wonder if Nurse Jane could have come along
and taken it to the hollow stump bungalow herself?”